By adopting an AHRI-award-winning HR tech solution, Transport for NSW facilitated greater engagement with its ‘unwired’ employees through its Daily Connect pilot program.

Technology-enabled people practices have long supported HR to augment and enhance their initiatives. In recent years, we’ve seen some truly innovative applications streamlining what used to be labour-intensive processes. Transport for NSW’s case study, which saw it win Best Use of Technology at the 2023 AHRI Awards, is the perfect example of this.

In 2022, it identified a need to facilitate better communication between leaders and frontline employees in the face of a series of challenges, including responding to severe weather events, operational staff shortages and negotiating a new enterprise agreement. Part of the solution came in the form of the Daily Connect initiative, a concept that impressed the AHRI award judges and demonstrated an innovative use of technology.

The idea was simple: develop an interface for employees that would provide real-time, ongoing feedback directly to their leaders so they felt better supported. It aimed to address the risk that staff would not feel connected to their leaders and therefore may not feel safe to raise issues and opportunities to improve.

“We have over 26,000 staff at Transport and more than half of those are frontline staff running a 24/7 operation for customers, passengers and freight,” says David Monti, Senior Manager for Culture and Engagement at Transport for NSW. “In that 24/7 environment, it’s important to know that we’re attuned to what’s changing for people because their needs can be different at any one point in time. 

“We learned a lot, particularly through COVID, around checking in with our people more regularly, especially at core points in time due to lockdowns or restrictions.

We wanted to build on these learnings by improving how we listen,” he says. 

In 2022, NSW TrainLink, part of the Transport Portfolio, was selected to pilot the initiative due to the high number of geographically distributed frontline staff. 

A feedback strategy that makes employees feel heard

Daily Connect was a way for the HR team to test the waters by gathering real-time feedback. From this data, they were able to develop an employee listening strategy that allowed frontline employees to feel heard. 

This included a leader dashboard, which collates data in an easy-to-understand format and provides information on analytics, including team comparisons across NSW TrainLink. This provided a personalised approach for leaders to speak to their teams more effectively about what mattered most to them. For example, leaders were able to use the dashboards to identify where response rates were particularly low and target station visits and check-ins to find out more.

“We found that when parts of NSW TrainLink saw improvement in job satisfaction and their experience of leadership, that meant those teams felt more engaged and more confident.” – David Monti, Senior Manager, Culture and Engagement, Transport for NSW

In line with Transport for NSW’s people strategy, this was considered a pilot to learn how to scale the solution for future use cases. 

With that, various use cases for the tech were tried when implementing the Daily Connect interface. A pulsing tool, which measured employee engagement, was used to distribute a randomised set of questions to employees, and the frequency of questions would change as required. It quickly became apparent that daily communications were too much for most staff. Paring back interactions to once or twice a week was optimal.

“We played around a lot with how much information and data to give our frontline leaders. Not with the aim of withholding information, but just to make it simple for them. Especially when their day job is a 24/7 operation, we needed to make it easy for them to take action,” says Monti. 

Daily Connect was well-supported during the pilot period, with new participants joining the platform at an average rate of 3.28 per cent per week. The learnings from the pilot are now being used to support mechanisms that can be scaled up for different parts of the entire Transport for NSW workforce.

“We were also able to go into statistical analysis to demonstrate the value of this initiative,” says Monti. “We found that when parts of NSW TrainLink saw improvement in job satisfaction and their experience of leadership, that meant those teams felt more engaged and more confident in their ability to deliver great customer service.”

Enhancing feedback systems with gamification

The other thing that helped with engagement was adding a gamification element. A trial was undertaken with some staff interacting via SMS to ascertain whether giving further information through a two-way text dialogue would incentivise people to respond more. 

“For example, the survey might ask, ‘How do you feel about your ability to respond to customers today?’ and they would give an 8 out of 10, and the response would come back ‘Thanks for your feedback. The average score was 9 out of 10,” says Monti.

Two-way dialogue was found to produce a response rate almost double that of a non-gamified interaction. 

Communications sent by SMS proved much more effective than email, with a 160 per cent better response rate. 

“Our frontline staff are out helping our customers and keeping our network moving. Using SMS was a great way to help them quickly respond if they wanted to participate but [still focus on] their day jobs.”

Another telling outcome was that the program empowered 142 leaders with actionable insights to better support their teams. This resulted in the highest-ever improvement in employee satisfaction with their leader’s support. 

“We’re really proud of this AHRI award. It reflects the importance we place on acknowledging our frontline employees over a tough few years. It also helps reinforce the priority we’re placing on respecting and engaging our workforce. 

“It tells us we’re on the right track as we continue to focus on this.” 

A version of this article was originally published in the Feb/March edition of HRM Magazine.

Celebrate the exceptional achievements in HR practice at the 2024 AHRI Awards. Submissions are now open, with new categories and scholarship opportunities. Learn more here.